Perhaps marginally trailing love, war has remained a top fascination for filmmakers, almost since the birth of cinema itself. Directors love depicting war because it can be many things all at the same time. War is, at once, a macro geopolitical shift and an intimate human tragedy. It’s both honourable and disgusting, simple and infinitely complex. Of course, in the wrong hands, war movies can be, ironically, quite dull (War Horse, Hacksaw Ridge) — or worse: cynical, propaganda exercises (American Sniper, Lone Survivor).
However, there have been many depictions of war that have stuck the landing and, in doing so, approached the subject in wildly divergent ways. Many of the following entries question the morality at the heart of war and how it can be bent and reshaped. But they encompass other themes too, such as the brutal hubris of idealism and power. Some of these are terrifying. Some, conversely, are quite beautiful.
15. Alexander (2004)
Oliver Stone’s epic, Alexander, makes the list purely due to its pedantic dedication to historical accuracy, a standard which most war movie directors are happy to skimp on. Stone, however, really leaned into the nerdiness and pedantry here and credit to him. Before shooting the movie, the director went on a tour of the academy, consulting historians from Oxford and CUNY Queens College to make sure all the phalanxes and battle formations were exactly correct. Apparently, Eugene N. Borza, a professor lecturing on Ancient Macedon at Penn State called the film’s depiction of the battle of Gaugamela “impressive”, so, kudos Oliver.
14. Das Boot (1981)
This is as good as a five hour movie about Nazis in a submarine can possibly get. Based on a novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot perfectly navigates the line between eerie tedium and gripping suspense. It’s all immensely claustrophobic, as you’d expect, with the broad global scope of World War II reduced to a couple of hundred metres inside a metal box under the sea. Probably best viewed in two sittings, but definitely worth the lengthy run time.
13. Dunkirk (2017)
There are lots of Hans Zimmer/Christopher Nolan moments in Dunkirk that’ll kind of blow your ears off. And in a war film, that feels appropriate – war does seem quite loud. But it’s the quieter, stiller moments – infrequent as they are in the film – that really elevate Dunkirk above your standard big brutal battlepic. Obviously, it looks excellent – the camera pulls you right into not only the action but, so often, the moments of anticipation just before. And Harry Styles! Better than you’d think! And a young Barry Keoghan. Mark Rylance. Kenneth Brannagh. Basically, there are lots of different reasons to like this film, and together they’re a cinematic symphony.
12. Paths of Glory (1957)
“War is hell” is probably the best-established and, it must be said, most fruitful thematic seam the war movie genre has mined. A less-explored one is the ways in which military structures and environments can be used to interrogate ideas of hierarchy and authority. But it’s clearly one Stanley Kubrick is interested in – long before Full Metal Jacket’s army training camp came his first effort as writer, director and producer, Paths of Glory. Kirk Douglas plays a french army colonel whose subordinate troops face a court martial after refusing to follow through with what they deem to be a suicide mission, in a work that would’ve surely been falling over with Oscars had it come at a time of greater Kubrick-recognition. Its success is such that it arguably has a stronger identity as an anti-war film than many of its “war is hell” genre-mates, and it’s as carefully thought-out as any better-known Kubrick.
11. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Yes, this film has a ‘not now grandad’ reputation, but look at it; it’s genuinely stunning. The film tells the story of T. E. Lawrence, a spiffing British former archaeologist who helped lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The movie is immaculately shot by David Lean and cinematographer, Freddie A. Young, featuring some incredible wide shots of the Jordanian desert. The film swells with a brooding hallucinatory element, the heat-thickened air constantly dancing in the background somewhere. One scene, early in the film, featuring a faraway camel, is right up there with the most suspenseful sequences of any war film since.
10. They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
They Shall Not Grow Old brings to full-colour life reels upon reels of footage of ordinary British soldiers on the front line of the first world war. In doing so, it becomes an interesting case-study for what the presence – or absence – of colour can do for a film. At its most basic, colour implies modernity, as opposed to the antiquity of monochrome. In They Shall Not Grow Old the effect of this is to make the men we see in the trenches more like us, more imaginable as equivalents instead of as relics or pieces of archive.
But colour also brings detail – vividness, and depth. And what this film is really all about is vividness and depth. It adds so much life to a portion of history we tend to think of in purely historical terms. It adds shades of character and conversation, turning strategic pawns at the whim of generals and politicians into people with complicated lives that were complicated further by war. Get Back may, somewhat understandably, go down as Peter Jackson’s definitive foray into the documentary genre. But like a classically-underloved child, They Shall Not Grow Old will always be his first.
9. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
There are many ways for a movie to go about exploring Francoism, but few of them are likely to involve magical fauns. Nevertheless, in 2006, Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, produced something remarkable. Pan’s Labyrinth is set on the frontiers of the Spanish Civil War, where an imaginative, yet troubled little girl, has been introduced to one of cinema’s worst step-dads: Captain Vidal, a sadistic Falagist officer. However, hidden beneath the brutal realities of the surface world, a buried magical kingdom prepares for the arrival of a lost princess. Pan’s Labyrinth shouldn’t work; the dark realism colliding with whimsy fairy-tale, should be discordant and jarring, but it just isn’t.
8. M*A*S*H (1970)
The trailer for M*A*S*H describes it as “a motion picture that raises some important moral questions, and then drops them.” And while perhaps actually selling itself a little short, this gives a pretty good indication of the novel space this film occupies within the world of the war movie. Boasting Robert Altman behind the camera and Donald Sutherland in front of it, M*A*S*H follows the antics of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near the front line of the Korean War, as its more serious members are continually wound up by two surgeons intent on having as much fun as an ad-hoc wartime hospital has to offer. Which is more than you’d think.
That the characters dedicating themselves to this pursuit of fun are also saving people from the effects of war, rather than enacting them, is perhaps key to how the film avoids trivialising violence. M*A*S*H is, fundamentally, a comedy. It depicts people having a good, silly time. And with that will of course come accusations of glamourising war, but what M*A*S*H is actually glamourising, what it’s really interested in, is the ability humans have to retain their humanity, their playfulness and humour and everything the opposite of war, in such close proximity to it.
7. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Sure, not everyone remembers the second half of this film, but it doesn’t really matter, by then it’s already soldered into your brain. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is a truly unflinching vision of the US military machine: the sausage maker and the ground meat that comes out the other side. The movie also contains an extraordinary supporting role from R. Lee Ermey. Ermey was originally hired for technical support, but prior military experience helped him reach such operatic levels of offensive oratory that Kubrick couldn’t help but cast him as Sergeant Hartman. ”You had best square your ass away and start shitting me Tiffany cufflinks or I will definitely fuck you up!”
6. Waltz With Bashir (2008)
Bolstered by a dizzying score from Max Richter, Waltz With Bashir, recalls the experiences of the film's director, Ari Folman, a former IDF soldier whose involvement in the 1982 Lebanon war put him in close proximity to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman’s film is about memory and the responsibility that comes with participating in war. Beautifully animated, Waltz With Bashir follows Folman as he attempts to piece back together what happened to him in 1982. There’s his own personal amnesia, but Folman also happens upon a strange form of national amnesia too, one that underpins a nation's reticence to comprehend the consequences of its own military policies.
5. Come and See (1985)
Probably the most terrifying movie ever made. Elem Klimov’s 1985 anti-war movie, Come and See — originally titled, Kill Hitler — follows a teenage boy named Flyora, who joins the Belarusian partisans during the Nazi occupation. The film has a unique way of entering under the viewer’s skin. You’ll see it in nightmares; not because of the gore or the scale of the atrocities depicted, but because of its oppressive, covertly surreal atmosphere. The movie almost killed its leading actor, a sixteen-year-old Aleksei Kravchenko, who returned to school with grey hair after the wrap date.
4. The Zone of Interest (2023)
You won’t actually see much war in The Zone of Interest. You won’t even see inside the part of war it’s set around, focusing as it does on the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and their strangely idyllic life in a house that shares one of its garden walls with a concentration camp. But the film’s talent is one for invoking atrocity rather than depicting it. Aided by Mica Levi’s chilling soundtrack, Jonathan Glazer has created a work that, paradoxically, centres periphery. It uses its audience’s imagination to make itself two films at once – the one you’re seeing, on the screen, and the one you know is just out of shot. All through the film, the question of how cognisant its characters are of the full horror of what’s going on in that periphery, that second film, persists. It reaches ultimate resolution in a beautifully delicate touch.
3. Ran (1985)
Aside from Rashomon, 1985’s Ran is probably Akira Kurosawa’s best-known work, certainly his most epic in scale. The film is largely viewed as his last great masterpiece and, like it’s monochromatic cousin, Throne of Blood, adapts a Shakespeare play to a contemporaneous historical Japan. The movie subtly extends the themes of King Lear and also features one of the most intense battle scenes put to cinema, beckoned in by a single line from the leading character, “We are in hell…” It’s been said that Ran looks like a moving painting, but it’s true, every frame feels like it was painstakingly composed inside a candlelit artist’s studio.
2. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, has become potentially the most famous war film ever released. This stands to reason. Reading Conrad’s — surprisingly short — novel, you’d be forgiven for thinking it impossible to adapt. As Conrad said, he was trying to describe the “very essence of dreams”, but, with a cast and crew reeling from dysentery in the Philippines, Coppola somehow achieved the impossible. He brought Conrad’s masterpiece into a new era of LSD, pop music, chemical warfare and attack helicopters, whilst still maintaining the poetic abyss at the heart of the story.
1. The Battle of Algiers (1966)
The relevance of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is perpetually borne back into the present. Starring — and produced by — members of the Algerian FLN, Pontecorvo’s 1966 release does something perilously brave; it reminds us of the horrors of French colonialism whilst simultaneously proving that suffering an unjust system is not a prerequisite for a group acting morally. Produced in the wake of liberatory struggles in Angola, Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America, The Battle of Algiers, is a true piece of anti-imperialist cinema, refusing to cede discursive territory in any direction and containing a full spectrum of ambiguous shades of grey.
